


So Comes the Cadenza

by cyanspica



Series: Death of a Nation [3]
Category: Hamilton - Miranda, The Last of Us
Genre: Alternate Universe - No American Revolution, Alternate Universe - Zombie Apocalypse, Angst, Apocalypse, Established Thomas Jefferson/James Madison, Falling In Love, M/M, Pining, Reverse Chronology
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-22
Updated: 2020-10-22
Packaged: 2021-03-08 21:40:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,264
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27143296
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cyanspica/pseuds/cyanspica
Summary: Hamilton gets bit—but, improbably, impossibly, he doesn't die.The three of them get more time, and they use it to collide and come apart.
Relationships: Alexander Hamilton/James Madison, Alexander Hamilton/John Laurens, Alexander Hamilton/Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton/Thomas Jefferson/James Madison, Thomas Jefferson/James Madison
Series: Death of a Nation [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1797781
Comments: 24
Kudos: 79





	So Comes the Cadenza

**Author's Note:**

> important pre-reading notes: 
> 
> -if you haven't read [death of a nation](https://archiveofourown.org/works/24437983/chapters/58964761) this fic will make no fucking sense. you're absolutely welcome to! but prepare to be confused as hell
> 
> -this fic is told in reverse chronological order, meaning that each scene takes place back further in time. the first half of this side fic has NOT happened as of the end of chapter six in death of a nation. scene one takes place in november 2013; chapter six ends sometime in june 2013. the beginning half won't be familiar, and it takes a bit to get back to june 2013, but once you're there, you'll start recognizing events. i think this fic is best read with time occurring in reverse, but if you find it too confusing, then you can always start at the last scene and read scrolling up

**So Comes the Cadenza**

* * *

**November 2013**

They’ve all been a powder keg about to explode for months, and even though it’s Hamilton that blows first, Madison lights the fuse and watches it burn.

It all goes up in flames in November. 

* * *

**Late August 2013**

_One goddamn lapse in judgment,_ Madison thinks. _Just one goddamn lapse._

And now the tenuous grasp on whatever it is the three of them have built for themselves is teetering on the edge. Thomas has been oblivious to the _why,_ but not to the _what._ Thomas knows that Madison is tense, on edge, just waiting for the shoe to drop. Madison is exceptionally good at concealing how he feels—but not from Thomas. Never from Thomas.

No matter how plain Madison keeps his face, no matter how still he keeps his hands, Jefferson can see right through him. He doesn’t know what gives him away because if he did, he would hide it.

The _what_ has been clear, and now the _why_ is dangerously close to coming out.

“Jemmy?” he asks one warm night, voice tired and confused and thick from sleep. Madison turns around. It’s so damn dark—he never gets used to how dark it is now—that he can only see the glint of moonlight off of Jefferson’s eyes. “Goin’ somewhere?” Jefferson asks, shifting in bed.

“I thought I heard something outside,” Madison lies, hoping that the dark hides his lie, that Jefferson is too tired to take it at anything but face value.

“Mmkay. I’ll come with you.”

“That’s not necessary,” he soothes, gentle. “Go back to sleep, dear.”

“Uh-huh. Like I’m gonna fuckin’ sleep if you’re out there in the dark.”

Madison wonders if Jefferson is calling his bluff, leaning into their mutual aversion to worrying the other. It’s implausible given that Jefferson is obviously more asleep than awake, but—no, he’s probably only acting according to instinct: they look after one another, no matter what that entails, no matter what it costs. Sleep be damned.

But whatever the reason, it makes Madison’s heart feel overfull.

(Does he have enough room?)

It’s been so long, so many years, yet he feels even more strongly about Thomas than he did at the start. How is that even possible? How is that every day, he loves Thomas more? It seems unreasonable. There must be a cap at some point, some point where his heart simply has no more room, and yet he never seems to hit in.

How is it possible to love someone as much as he does?

And how is it possible that he betrayed that?

“No,” Madison says, sighing. “It was likely just my imagination.”

He sets down his revolver on the nightstand, reluctant to stay but more needed in bed than chasing after some more than likely nonexistent threat. He slips back into bed.

Thomas makes a low sound of contentment in his chest. Slides to the middle of the bed. Loops an arm around Madison’s back, pulls him against his chest. Madison allows it, allows himself a long few minutes of sleepy, unhurried kissing. There’s no heat to it, nothing but the too-needed reassurance that, yes, they’re both still alive, yes, they’re still here, that, yes, they still have each other. Jefferson pulls away first, his sigh dreamy, unreserved.

“I love you,” he murmurs, drawing Madison in tighter.

“I love you too,” Madison says, inhaling sharply. 

Does he? Would someone that loves Thomas as much as he claims to do what he did?

“The world ended, and still that hasn’t changed,” Madison says, maybe more to himself than to Thomas.

“So you gon’ tell me what’s been on your mind?” 

Jefferson sounds more awake now, and Madison closes his eyes before Jefferson can try to meet his. He shakes his head slowly, breathes out.

“It’s not something you can fix.”

“I don’t care. You’re the love of my life, and if something’s weighin’ on your mind, it’s on mine too.” He waits a moment, presses a kiss to the back of Madison’s neck. “So tell me, Jemmy.”

He says it so goddamn sincerely. It’s not fair. It’s not fucking fair.

Madison can’t tell him the truth, much as he wants to, and so he lies. It feels like that’s all he ever does. Just lie to Thomas again and again, just repackage the words in different ways.

“It’s only that I miss Dolley,” he says, shaking his head. “I’ve been thinking of her since Montpelier. If no one else, she is alive. Was alive.”

Jefferson sucks in a breath, thumb rubbing circles into the back of his neck.

“Yeah. She was somethin’,” Thomas says, voice low and mournful because, yes, they both know that _is_ something he can’t fix. Jefferson sighs, clicks his tongue against his teeth, does the next best thing and comforts him. “But I think she’s just fine, Jemmy. C’mon. You and me aren’t doing bad, huh? Two rich boys like us can make it, so can she.”

“You’re neglecting that we made it out of luck,” he replies, voice soft. “How many times would one of us have died without the other there to help?”

“She was with Angelica, don’t you think? Two of them’ll be just fine.”

Angelica’s name makes Madison sigh, but not out of dislike. No, he liked Angelica well. 

_“I think you’re good for Thomas,”_ he once told her, and he’d meant it, even though the words burned his tongue on their way out. _“And I think the two of you will be very happy together.”_

“Why did you break up?” Madison asks out of nowhere, surprising them both.

“Uh,” Jefferson drawls, taken off-guard. 

Madison wants to fucking punch himself.

“Forget I said anything,” he hastens to say, shaking his head, but Thomas rushes to reassure him.

“It’s fine,” he promises, and that’s it—Thomas thinks that Angelica’s what’s really been bothering him, and—in some way—that’s true, but it’s part of a much larger picture, a picture that makes Madison feel like he wasted years that he’ll never get back. “I don’t know,” Thomas says after a moment. “It was a bunch of things. I mean, we were both so fuckin’ busy with her new job. My election. We did our schedules one day and just… there was one day out of three weeks we were even gonna be in the same town. And I guess that was it.”

He says it, but there’s more there, more than they can’t talk about unless they acknowledge their breakup _,_ and they don’t acknowledge that. But they should.

They need to, because Thomas knows something's not quite right, and that's not all of it, but it'd be something.

(Or maybe Madison needs to. Maybe he needs to make sense out of what he did. Hear either that he was justified or that he wasn’t. For his own sake. To make sense of wasted time).

But how does he bring something like that up? How does he even begin?

“Jemmy?”

“Just thinking,” he replies, distant.

_I want to apologize._

That’s how he should start.

But by the time the words come to him, hours later, Thomas is asleep.   
  


* * *

  
  


**Mid-August 2013**

Madison’s tongue has a remarkable habit of getting all too loose when he drinks too much. He talks too much, talks a little too long, lets his guard down.

He fucks up.

He should know better, but he does something he knows is a bad idea, and he fucks up.

Hamilton takes his fuck up and runs with it.

That’s the thing about Hamilton. He doesn’t trip. He fucking faceplants. Every time something bad happens, he holds onto it until it’s downright terrible. He can’t let go.

He can’t let go, and they both fuck up.

* * *

Madison hates tequila so much. So, so much.

Hates it so much worse when it comes back up.

He makes a weak noise in the back of his throat, spits, heaves again, spits again. The door opens behind him, and Jefferson sympathetically clicks his tongue, slides up, puts a warm hand over his back. Madison shies away from the touch, heaves again hard, but there’s little left other than bile and the bitter, disgusting taste of secondhand tequila.

“Playing frat-boy with Hamilton, huh?” Jefferson asks, teasing, but Madison isn’t having it.

“Don’t talk to me,” he gets out, aware of how any authority in the order is lost to how pathetic he must look. 

He leans over the railing, spits again before he can think to apologize. Bile. Stings. _Goddamnit._ His ribs hurt. Jefferson comes up with a water bottle. Offers it to him. He accepts as reluctantly as a beaten dog, washes his mouth, spits. Drinks some more. 

The world spins. Nauseous. Sick. He wants to lay down. Pass out.

“What’d he say to you?” Jefferson asks at last, voice wary and colored red. Madison makes a vague noise of confusion. “He said he pissed you off. Why you knocked him off the chair.”

And now Hamilton is covering for him, making him complicit in lies against his own partner. Fantastic. Now Madison is stuck in this goddamn lie he didn't even known about until just now, and he’s dug his grave so deep he has no hope to do anything but sleep in it. What’s the right response? Madison racks his brain, furious at himself for just how hard it is. He’s never getting drunk again.

Fuck Hamilton. He never should’ve—

“I don’t care what he said,” Madison swears angrily, shaking his head. “I wish we had—”

He doesn’t know where he’ll end the sentence, but it will be somewhere awful and something he doesn’t mean, and so he stops himself even through his anger.

That’s the thing about him: he’s not like Hamilton, who’s all unrestrained passion, all impulsiveness, all in-the-moment. No. He has self-control, and he doesn’t dig himself into fucking holes. Ever. Unless, apparently, he’s drunk and in Hamilton’s presence.

“Okay,” Thomas says. “Come on. I’m going to take you inside.”

“What, pray tell, do you mean by that?”

“It means you’ll swear at me when I pick you up.”

“You damn well better not,” he starts to say, but he’s too drunk to stop Jefferson from sweeping him up bridal-style into his arms. He’s not too drunk to, as predicted, swear at him.

Hamilton is nowhere to be found. They make it to their bedroom for the night unbothered, and Jefferson sets him down on the bed, waits patiently as Madison fumbles through unbuttoning his clothing, angrily tossing it aside and sliding undressed beneath the sheets. Jefferson follows suit, and out of misplaced anger, Madison wants to tell him to fuck off.

He doesn’t, of course. Anger is his knee-jerk reaction when he’s upset and too drunk to be capable of higher thought processes—but one of his lowest thought processes is never to hurt Thomas. Loving him is as second nature as breathing, and until he forgets to do that too, nothing will change. So he feels angry silently. At Hamilton. At Jefferson. At the whole damned fucking world, and, most of all, at himself.

“I’m fucking sick of this,” Madison says after a minute’s passed, and he doesn’t even know what he’s talking about.

The world spins nauseatingly, and tequila clings to the back of his throat. He hates how poorly he’s put together right now, hates that he’s lost his calm. He feels terribly, terribly pathetic, and he feels distinctly guilty that Thomas has to watch him fall apart so thoroughly.

“Not sick of me, though,” Jefferson shoots back, and it’s a joke, but there’s an edge to it, a fear of abandonment that Madison doesn’t think was there even a few weeks back.

Why, then, he wonders, is it there now?

“I couldn’t be sick of you,’ Madison says, and he wonders if Jefferson hears something new in his voice too.

Hears what he’s done. Hears how he feels.

Because how the fuck could he? How could he? How could—  
  


* * *

**Early August 2013**

Madison is adult enough to understand his own feelings. He understands, then, that there’s something he feels for Hamilton that he’s only ever felt one other place before.

He also understands that he can never, never let it slip, let alone act on it.

There’s a constant push-pull on him these days, it seems. A constant game of tug-of-war that no one knows they’re playing but him. Hamilton on one side, Jefferson on the other.

He can’t keep the balance forever, not when Thomas knows the balance is in question—even if he doesn’t quite yet know what’s being weighed.

And as if all that isn’t enough, the balance is in question from two fucking directions.

* * *

**End of July 2013**

“... said anything lately?”

Madison stills, goes perfectly quiet where he stands and listens to the voices drifting up from below on the porch.

“What do you mean?” Hamilton’s voice replies, skittish and uncertain, and there’s no one who can be the other voice but Thomas.

“Fucking Christ, you're both bugging out on me. Come on, Hamilton. I _know_ you've noticed that he’s meditating almost every damn day, haven’t you? And that he’s been on edge? I just want to know if he’s said anything to you.”

Goddamnit.

“That sounds like it’s between the two of you,” Hamilton says after a second, but he sounds defensive, and Jefferson hears it too.

“He told you not to tell me?” Jefferson deduces, caught somewhere between upset and confused.

“No,” Hamilton hastens to say, shaking his head. “It was—fuck. Look, it’s not my fucking problem, okay? Leave me out of your goddamned relationship, alright?”

“I’m getting left out of my own goddamned relationship!” Jefferson snaps, and Hamilton looks taken aback before Jefferson collects himself, shakes his head, pinches the bridge of his nose. “Look— _shit._ You’re right. It’s not your problem, and you shouldn’t be caught between us, alright? I’ll drop it. But please, if there’s anything I need to know— _really need to know—_ please tell me. We both care about him, right? No damn reason we shouldn’t be on the same team.

Hamilton shifts on his feet, looking trapped.

“Yeah,” is all he says, sounding utterly unconvinced.

Jefferson hears it too—but he lets him go anyways.

* * *

**Late July 2013**

_and skin sinew bone ripping muscle screaming_

Madison gasps awake, shoots up in bed, heart shrieking. He looks first for Thomas, but the bed is empty—and so he pivots, forces himself to breathe. In. Out. He lifts fingers to his throat, finds his pulse. One-sixty-two. In. Out. Breathe. Ten-count. One-forty-three. _You’re alive. Still alive. Just a dream._ One-fifteen. Breathing. Thirty-count. _All alive._ Below one-hundred.

Madison wets his lips, glances once more at the empty space beside him. He presses his hand into the indent, but there’s no warmth; Thomas has been gone a while.

He stands, slides on his shoes, creeps quietly into the hall. He pauses as he passes Hamilton’s room, a strange certainty that he’s not in there striking him. Madison hesitates a few seconds—then pushes the door open. His eyes fall onto an empty bed.

Thomas sits alone in the living room beside a lit candle, a book in his hands. He looks up, guilt splashing onto his face. 

“Shit, did you have a nightmare? Fuck, baby, I’m sorry. I didn’t want to wake you up.” 

He stands, but Madison waves him off. 

“I’m fine, Thomas. Nothing I couldn’t deal with. Where’s Hamilton?”

“Smoking. I told him to go outside. Didn’t want him to set off your asthma,” Thomas replies. 

Madison is sure Hamilton appreciated that—except he’s sure Hamilton didn’t and probably came within an inch of telling Thomas that his asthma is a white lie.

Reluctantly, Thomas returns to his book. Or he pretends to—Madison sees his eyes slide up as he moves towards the door, worried. 

“Are you going out?”

“I want to get the biography I’ve been reading. I’ll be back in a few minutes to read with you.”

Thomas settles down a little more at that, his smile tired but brighter than before.

When Madison steps outside, he finds Hamilton pacing wide, frantic circles around the Escalade. Smoked-out cigarette butts litter the ground around him. He waits until Hamilton notices him with a start, hand skittering towards his gun before recognition lights his face.

"You're going to develop a habit," Madison tells him, voice neutral. 

"If I do, then I'm gonna get cut off fast. Down to two packs," Hamilton sourly replies.

"Then I'll teach you to meditate." At that, Hamilton's mouth twitches into something half-resembling a smile. “If you're smoking, it's safe to bet that you're worried. What’s on your mind?” Madison goes on, perfectly neutral, almost conversational.

He opens the Escalade, feigns searching for his book, pretends that Hamilton isn’t the reason he came out to the car in the first place. Hamilton doesn’t like feeling coddled.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” Hamilton says, desperate, shaking his head.

“Then may I talk?” Madison asks, his fingers locking around the spine of his book.

“You don’t need an invitation,” he says, “Free country.”

“I would wager that it isn’t,” Madison says, wry, and that at least wrings a laugh out of him.

Madison doesn’t quite mean to spill it out the way he does. But the weight of his guilt has forced him to reconsider so much, so much time, and the moment the first word is out of his mouth, the momentum crushes him full-force.

“Thomas and I would’ve had years more of good time if I hadn’t broken up with him.”

 _Fantastic choice of conversation,_ he praises himself.

“Yeah. I don’t get why you broke up with him,” Hamilton replies, unexpectedly blunt. “And apparently he doesn’t either. Pretty big fucking secret to keep for so long.”

“Because I have never felt certain that I made the right choice,” he admits, “and I’m afraid more than ever that I didn’t.”

Hamilton opens his mouth. Pauses. Closes it. Thinks. Waits. 

“I believed,” Madison says, words careful, “that it was the moral choice. Perhaps I wouldn’t ever find a relationship with a woman I could love publicly—but Thomas could. It was a burden on him to never openly hold my hand. Kiss me. Tell anyone I was his partner. He pretended otherwise, but I knew. He’s always been like that—loud, willing to live his life in the public eye.” He shakes his head, equal parts fond and mournful. “I’ve never been quite so keen on that. And our careers would be dead in the water the moment someone caught wind of our relationship.”

“Why didn’t you just tell him that?” Hamilton asks, shaking his head. “You don’t think he would’ve agreed? Or at least understood?”

“There was more to the situation,” Madison divulges. “It was complicated.”

He takes the cigarette Hamilton offers, checks that he’s out of the line of sight of the windows, then lights it. As he smokes, it strikes him heavily how much he misses Dolley. Francis. George. Abigail Adams. His mother. All his siblings. His entire family—almost all certainly wiped out.

Thomas is the love of his life, but he was never the only person Madison had—at least not before the outbreak. Before, Madison always had a small, close circle of friends, family, people he could talk to, get advice from, be with. And now he hasn’t had anyone else to talk to for years—when he’s needed them most, when his doubts have grown and piled atop one another, when guilt has so often crushed his conscience, when he now knows so little at all. When the only thing he does know is that there’s a fucking disaster on the horizon.

“I was blackmailed,” he confesses. “Or my father was, rather. In an election year. A particularly difficult race against a Tory.” He inhales a breath of smoke so deep his lungs ache. “The aesthetics of having me as a son, you understand, were not helpful. It would’ve jeopardized his career. Mine would’ve been dead in the water before it’d even been born.” He closes his eyes. “And Thomas’s too. And so,” he wearily exhales, “I called it off.”

“And your dad…?”

“He paid the blackmailer off. Wasn’t even surprised when he called me into his office.” Madison thinks of his father for a moment: disciplined, powerful, all the calm of the eye of a hurricane. Brilliant too—at least brilliant enough to see Madison’s lovestruckness for what it was. For who it was for. “But it was a temporary solution to what would inevitably be a recurring problem. I decided the risk to our career wasn’t justifiable—not when Thomas could find someone else.”

Hamilton laughs, and the sound’s so unexpectedly startling it makes Madison open his eyes. Incredulous, Hamilton shakes his head. 

“You think he’d ever look at anyone else the way he looks at you?” he says, and there’s something in his voice, a flash of color beneath shadows. Not too long ago, Madison wouldn’t know what to make of it—but he thinks back to the library last week, and he thinks he knows.

“He and Angelica were very happy together,” Madison says, and he’s not sure if he’s arguing with Hamilton or himself, or if he’s thinking aloud and wondering what he’s doing at all.

“And who the fuck did he end up? Come on, Madison. It was always going to be you. Any universe, any set of circumstances—he was always going to end up with you,” Hamilton insists, and though the bitterness in his voice is very carefully hidden, Madison hears it now.

He parses the words carefully, parses Hamilton’s expression, performs a careful dissection, and he understands. He understands, too, that he can’t let Hamilton know.

Because he’s terrified that Hamilton will run. That Hamilton will weigh the scales, realize it's better to be gone entirely. Passion that Madison once thought was reckless is everything but—no, Hamilton cares with his entire heart, never does anything half-heartedly. And it's so damn clear that he cares about them.

(About Thomas).

Hamilton would weigh the scales, see the potential for the hurt he'd cause, and he would feel like he'd have to run.

Madison doesn't think he can bear the thought.

“Then you think I made the wrong choice,” he says, oblique.

Hamilton will only look at him from the side of his eye, like he can’t quite stomach seeing him full-on. He shifts on his feet, shoulders folding defensively in, but his voice is steadfast.

“I think the choice you made was because of your career. Not because you thought he would be happier with someone else,” Hamilton replies. He inhales sharply from his cigarette. “He wouldn’t be. As happy, sure—but like I said. Look at who he went back to.”

A certain rare, raw vulnerability splits open Madison’s expression, rock-solid certainty cracking to expose something frail. Hamilton blinks, surprised, not sure what to do or say.

“And was I wrong?” he doubts.

Because he feels wrong. He feels like a goddamn traitor to the person he cares more about—or as much as, Christ, he can hardly keep track of his own feelings, and—and _goddamnit._

_God damn it all._

“I would’ve done the same thing,” Hamilton finally offers as consolation. He drops his cigarette, moves towards the house. “But fuck if I know whether that makes it right. I’m not the goddamn paragon of morality.” He turns over his shoulder, smiles wry and sour and with a flash of guilt that Madison feels he understands all too well. And as he goes, he hands Madison’s words guiltily (and almost hopefully) back to him. “I’m just a man, right?”  
  


* * *

**Mid-July 2013**

Madison misses the ocean from the moment it’s in their rear-view mirror. Is that it? Another year before they go back to the last place that brings him peace of mind? He feels the need to stay on the move nearly as strongly as Hamilton, but still. There’s something to be said for stability, for peace of mind, for a feeling of security—even if it’s an illusion.

Of course, he doesn’t say any of that aloud, doesn’t express his doubts—Thomas is still riding their post-anniversary high, and Madison has no desire to trample that down.

They drive.

* * *

There’s a big, sprawling white brick estate on the top of the hill they pass, and Jefferson pulls over the second he sees it. There’s no reason they need to stop for the night yet, not really, but the estate promises to be half a dozen times as luxurious as most of their other nightly accommodations, so Madison doesn’t question him.

His eyes flick to the rear-view mirror. Hamilton, surprisingly, is asleep in the backseat. Less surprisingly, his mouth is pressed-tight as his jaw grinds. His chest heaves. He makes a quiet, terrified sound, and Madison forces himself to look away.

“Nightmare?” Jefferson quietly asks, and Madison’s somber expression is enough of an answer. 

Jefferson’s mouth pulls downward, one hand unconsciously dropping off the steering wheel to rest atop Madison’s. Thomas knows how he worries for Hamilton. In certain ways, Madison can barely reach the man while he’s awake—and while he’s asleep, there’s nothing he can do at all.

As they pull up behind the estate, Jefferson purposefully hits the brakes a little too hard. Hamilton’s eyes snap open, wild and panicked. He blinks once, twice, searches the car, sees them both. He breathes in. Exhales. Looks away.

“Where are we?” Hamilton asks, voice still raspy despite his best efforts to make it sharp.

“West Kentucky,” Jefferson replies, distinctly not commenting on the nightmare.

Hamilton glances through the window up at the estate, slowly returning to himself. A familiar distaste paints his features. Wryly, he glances back to the front seat.

“Think they’ve got an in-house movie theater?”

“I think the owners were rich enough to have a fantastic library, and that’s what interests me,” Jefferson answers. He laughs a second later. “Unless you get the movie theater working. That happens, then maybe you could convince me to take a break from reading.”

“Yeah? What movie? Titanic?” Hamilton mocks him. “Or are you more of an arthouse film critic? Wait, let me guess—you’ve been to the Cannes Film Festival.”

“And if I have? Some of us like finer things than carcinogenic popcorn and _Sharknado_.”

“You’re so goddamn insufferable. Sharknado’s a modern classic!”

There’s a comfortable amiability to their bickering. Both of them are smiling, and as he listens, Madison finds that he too has a faint, loving twist in his lips. There’s no need to step in, impose an olive branch. In fact, he doesn’t have to play peacekeeper often at all anymore—not like the early days where he felt like a goddamn bomb defusal technician.

Madison listens to them go back-and-forth as they clear the house, and the feelings in his chest mix with one another until the line between his love for Thomas and Hamilton blurs too much for him to keep the feelings apart. He loves these two men more than life itself, and, more complicatedly, neither more than one another. If Thomas is air, Hamilton is water. He sees no better future, hasn’t believed they’ll be able to find a cure since Boston—but none of it matters, because his world is right in front of him.

His world is these two men pretending they aren’t trying not to laugh, trying to suppress smiles as they argue over the merits of an absurd movie about tornadoes composed of sharks (or so he gathers from the context that _‘Sharknado’_ provides).

The twisted ravel of feelings in his chest is impossible to detangle, impossible to cleanly cut, and Madison is irrevocably fucked. 

Jefferson turns around, sees Madison watching with what must be an utterly lovestruck expression, and his eyes wash with warmth. Madison tries not to think about how he doesn’t know that it’s not only him that the look is for when Thomas presses a kiss to his mouth.

“C’mon. Let’s find a room,” Jefferson says, interlacing their fingers. “Could go for a nap before I break into the library. What’d’ya think?”

Madison glances over Jefferson’s shoulder for a fraction of a second and catches Hamilton’s eyes on their interlocked hands, something deeply wounded in his expression. Madison’s heart wrenches in his chest. He squeezes Thomas’s hand, lets go, and steps back.

“You go ahead,” Madison tells him. “I’d like to find someplace to meditate for half an hour or so. I’ll find you afterwards.”

“Sure,” Jefferson easily agrees, kissing him again. “Hamilton, you wanna go poke around the grounds, see if we can scrounge up something fresh for dinner?”

“Uh,” Hamilton says after a second, suddenly inarticulate. “I’ll pass. Tired.”

Jefferson raises both brows and doubt splashes on his face, but he shrugs it off a second later.

“Canned soup it is,” Jefferson wryly remarks. “And the chicken noodle is mine, for the record. We’re down to one can. Great—glad that’s settled! I’ll be in the library if y’all need anything.”

After he leaves, Hamilton and Madison stand a second longer, lingering.

Madison wonders if Hamilton knows. And Hamilton looks at him, a flash of guilt in his face, and Madison is suddenly struck with the distinct thought that perhaps they’re both trying to hide something from one another. Wouldn’t that just be the perfect web?

“You should rest if you’re tired,” Madison says, but there’s no real force behind his words. He just can’t let the silence drag on longer, increase the risk of Hamilton seeing something he shouldn’t. “The bedrooms are back in the east wing of the house.”

“I’m not tired,” he protests.

“You told Thomas you were not thirty seconds ago,” Madison challenges him without thinking, and Hamilton’s jaw and shoulders tighten in response. “Hamilton,” he begins again, but the man in question shakes his head, cutting him off.

“I just didn’t want to go foraging. I’m running low on arrows. I don’t want to risk breaking any if I don’t have to. Would rather have them in case I need to take out infected.”

“Alright,” Madison concedes, even though he knows Hamilton is lying. 

Hamilton is a good liar, no doubt, but Madison has teased out his tells over the past year, knows how Hamilton’s shoulders drop, how his fingers knot at his sides, how he makes eye contact that much more intensely. He also knows that when Hamilton lies, he will never, never give up the truth. It’s easier to accept lies than push for the truth, better for their camaraderie, and so Madison lets the lie stand.

That said, he’s sure that Hamilton knows Madison is aware he’s lying.

And so they stand there a moment longer, locked in a strange tension, both trying to read the other, find some kind of hidden truth. Madison at last turns away, certain Hamilton will see through him first.

“I’ll be in the sunroom,” he says. “If there’s an emergency.”

Madison meditates undisturbed for an hour, clearly redraws the line in the sand between Hamilton and Jefferson, demarcates the difference in his feelings, and only when he’s certain he’s set for at least another day, he leaves.

The library is silent as he enters. It’s a cavernous thing—not quite like Monticello’s or Montpelier’s, but impressive nevertheless—and walls of bookshelves reach towards the yawning ceiling. He wanders through shelves of books, searching.

He’s half-sure that Jefferson and Hamilton aren’t there—and then he hears the sound of a page turning and follows.

The thing about Madison is that he’s always valued the quiet approach. The element of surprise. Better that people don’t know he’s coming.

Jefferson and Hamilton don’t hear him as he rounds the corner of a shelf.

He stills.

Jefferson never once looks up from his book, completely enraptured, but Hamilton has abandoned his. Instead, Hamilton watches Thomas, and Madison mistakes the look in his eyes for hurt until he looks twice and sees it for what it is.

The world seems very still then.

* * *

**July 4th 2013**

It takes Madison nearly a year of searching. He only finds one in time by two days, but holding it in his hands, he finds himself hardly able to suppress a smile. He hides it neatly away, waits until the eve of the fourth, presents it to Jefferson. He examines it carefully, his surprise gradually giving way to awe as he reads over the label.

“My god,” Jefferson swears, gasping. He looks up with wide eyes, childish glee splashed plain as day across his face, and Madison laughs. “You aren’t fucking with me, are you?”

“When have I ever?”

“Tonight, I hope,” Jefferson lightly retorts, dropping it to his side and pulling Madison in for a kiss that quickly grows too heated for a room Hamilton could walk in on.

Madison breaks away, but Jefferson doesn’t quite let him pull away, keeps their foreheads pressed together with an arm around Madison’s neck.

“Happy anniversary, Thomas,” Madison murmurs, bringing his hand up to touch the side of Thomas’s face. Thomas lifts his hand, wraps loose fingers around his wrist, leans into the touch. “I love you,” he says, and it’s not a lie, could never be a lie, but—

“I know,” Thomas laughs so softly. He kisses Madison again long and slow until the need to breathe makes itself known. “Will you play with me?” Thomas asks when they pull away.

“Always,” Madison replies, only letting his guilt onto his face when he turns away.

How many more anniversaries could they have had if he hadn’t—

Madison goes to the piano in the corner, lays his hands over the keys, and waits until Jefferson lifts his instrument, draws the bow over the strings.

Thomas plays their song—the duet, his accompanying side.

Madison is so caught off-guard that he messes up the first line, an irredeemable slur of keys. He recovers as quickly as he can, but there’s something off about the piece all the way through, something that clashes, keys that don’t quite align. It’s not a duet like it should be, no, not quite. They’re not fully in sync, not thinking alone the same paths, and each key drives home a new stab of guilt. Thomas is too clever not to read through the lines eventually.

Jefferson lowers his violin at the end of the last note, face confused.

“You changed the melodies,” he comments, brows furrowed.

“It’s been a long time since I last played it,” Madison tells him, and he wonders what it means that he couldn’t even play the piece right when he tried. “I’m sorry.”

“No, I didn’t say I didn’t like it,” Thomas hastens to reassure him, but he doesn’t look happy either. “It’s just… uh, different.”

But before they can talk further—for better or worse—Hamilton steps inside, hair wind-tousled and sea-salt stiff. He looks surprised, vaguely guilty to have walked in on their conversation. He seems to debate stepping back out, but his eyes slide between them both, focus on the violin in Jefferson’s hand. He rolls his eyes, mixed parts irritated and amused.

“Leave it to you to play the only instrument more elitist than the piano,” he snips.

“Mmhm. Even better: it’s a Stradivarius,” Thomas preens, flashing Hamilton a white grin.

Hamilton lifts both brows, his expression flat.

“Is that some kind of joke I’m too poor to understand?” 

“Well, it would’ve been a multi-million dollar gift two years ago, so I think that counts for something. If you had any taste in music, you’d know.” Jefferson tips his head towards a loveseat in the corner of the room, his happiness never so much as dimming. “Sit down. I’ll play something for you, show what an actual violin player sounds like. Trust me, you've never heard a real one before," he goes on, excitement flitting across his face. "Pick something. Whatever you like! I’m feeling generous.”

Madison blinks, brows lifting in his surprise.

Other than Madison, Thomas has never played for anyone but himself. Madison has certainly never known him to offer to play for a friend.

But he says nothing, lets Hamilton request a composer Madison knows Thomas hates—but Thomas doesn’t even so much as blink. 

He only lifts his bow and plays.

* * *

**June 2013**

When they find the graves, Madison wishes his wasn’t empty.

 _Jemmy,_ the marker reads.

Jemmy, a name he’ll never hear from anyone but Thomas ever again. His mother, father, siblings, dead, gone. He’ll never hear any of them call him Jemmy again.

His family has been gone this entire time, and he was none the wiser, but now he can push away the unimaginable no longer. His family, his parents, his siblings—most of whom he helped to raise—gone. Have been gone. All of them.

 _Not everyone,_ he desperately tries to remind himself. Francis is unaccounted for. Ambrose. Nelly. William. Reuben. Frances. Five siblings possibly alive; five certainly dead. And the rest of his family is gone. In an instant, he’s lost them all.

And he’ll never find the others. He’s sure of it.

Did it happen quickly, at least? Or was it terrifying, agonizing, and Christ, he's thinking—

“Oh,” Madison says.

He thinks of the youngest, can’t stop their faces from flashing in his mind, and he begins to crumble. He breathes in. Hamilton is watching him. He has to keep it together.

When he’s alone, he can fall apart.

But can he stay together long enough? 

_No,_ he thinks, because he may be steel, but he’s still only a man. _I can’t._

And with the bit of his strength, with fingers that can’t quite keep still, he reaches out and sweeps away more of the flowers growing on his tombstone. 

He sees it then. 

Silver glints in the light around the left side of the marker, and he knows the necklace before he even has it in his hand. The sapphire teardrop sits heavy in his palm.

“Dolley—my friend—was here once. When she buried me, I suppose,” he explains to Hamilton and Thomas. “I gave this to her when we graduated.”

Madison closes his eyes.

He pictures her: Dolley, his dearest friend. Dolley, who stood beside him through thick and thin, who sings so beautifully, who could charm the skin off a snake with her smile. Dolley, who has always believed in him with a surety he’s not quite sure he deserves, who was _alive,_ who made it past the first stages of the outbreak, who could still be out there, waiting, looking, trying to find him—because she has always believed in him, and she’ll believe he’s alive unless she sees his body with her own two eyes. Dolley, who left this here to let him know she made it further than most did just to give him spirit in a moment when she knew he would need it most.

Madison holds it together just a little longer.

* * *

Privately, he breaks.

 _Please look at me,_ Thomas begs him while he sits in the music room, but Madison refuses to.

Madison’s entire life for the past two years has been about protecting Thomas—from the infected, from other survivors, from Thomas’s own mind when he has to. This is no different.

Madison knows what hurts Thomas: he knows that nothing hurts him more than helplessness. And they’re both helpless here: Madison, helpless to save a family that was long since dead before he found them, and Thomas, helpless to protect him from thinking about everything alternative that could’ve been and never was.

Madison is hurting too badly. It would be easier to let Thomas help pick up the pieces, but the pieces are sharp and jagged, and there’s no need for anyone else to leave with bloody fingers and cut-up hands. Madison can do it alone. And if he does it alone, he can protect Thomas.

And even if he couldn’t protect his family, that still has to be worth something.

Privately, Madison breaks.

But he has two reasons to put himself back together, and so he starts.

Piece by painful, cutting piece.

* * *

From the corner of the basement in Montpelier, Madison watches as Hamilton stumbles to grab a bottle, drink hard. His eyes are wild, frightened, belong to an animal backed into a corner.

He’s about to spiral, take a nosedive straight towards the fucking ground. And he can’t—not now. Not when Madison is already in free fall. Thomas needs one of them to stay solid, and Madison can’t be that person right now. He needs Hamilton held together.

(And he doesn’t want to see Hamilton hurting, desperately wants to slow the bleeding at the source, but he can’t, and he certainly can’t try while he’s drunk, when he’s most liable to slip up. He can’t heal Hamilton, but he can give him something. Something that will maybe make a little sense out of the hurt. Take something bad, turn it into something good).

“I feel the same,” he commiserates with Hamilton, schooling his expression as the man jumps and spins around guiltily. He looks so goddamn lost. Guilty. Madison wants to… he doesn’t know. He wants to do something. Wants to put Hamilton together. And he needs to put himself together at least a little if he’s going to do that. “Come with me,” he tells Hamilton.

And he leads Hamilton to the piano. 

* * *

When he’s sobered up, he has a vague memory of C Major chords and scales, of showing Hamilton something good, trying to share his method of sublimation.

And while Hamilton is gone, he composes his own music.

There are motifs and melodies he recognizes from a song he played in March, frustration and remorse pouring out to fill the crevices between grief—all things he has in no short supply. He writes music furiously, almost frantically, desperate to spill out what he feels without the burden of having to put it into words.

And while Hamilton is there, he pulls the piece together.

Sometimes, at the end of their lessons, he plays Hamilton parts of a song that he wouldn’t know. Something written for someone else, but he plays it anyway.

It sounds different now.

* * *

Thomas waits for Madison to find him. He prepares an explanation. An apology, even.

But when they’re alone, Thomas just kisses him, so damn grateful that Madison knows without even having to ask that he would’ve waited forever if that was how long he needed.

* * *

  
  


**Early June 2013**

Losing his revolver in the mudslide feels like losing a limb.

Whether or not the rest of his family is dead, his father had already been gone for years. But Madison inherited more than his name from him—inherited his demeanor, his mind, his love of country. The gun, though, was the last and only physical thing from his father he had.

He mourns more than he perhaps should. Distracts himself from the loss and the sounds of the infected downstairs by worry over Jefferson’s leg and the gunshot wound angered by their mad dash inside. He worries over Hamilton’s painfully clawed torso and tries to push away the fear he felt when he and Thomas dragged him out from under a mass of infected.

There are many things to occupy his mind, so many that it takes a long time for sleep to come. 

(One of those things, Madison thinks, is that perhaps he and Hamilton are too close).

There’s a moment where Hamilton stirs in his sleep, wakes Madison up. Hamilton shifts uneasily in his sleep, his mouth stumbling over unsaid words, his face frightened. There’s a moment of weakness in Madison’s resolve, a moment where he crosses the line between what he feels and what he lets himself act on, and Madison reaches out, slides fingertips over Hamilton’s cheekbone, feeling the man instinctively lean into the touch. 

“Wake up, Alexander,” he pleads.

Hamilton makes an unintelligible sound, eyes half-awake as they open.

“It was only a nightmare. We’re here. You’re safe,” Madison soothes him, gentle, persuasive, too quiet to wake Thomas. Gently, he smiles, and if Hamilton was fully awake, then his smile would say too much. “Go back to sleep,” he says.

And Hamilton does.

Madison doesn’t, and just as he’s about to slip back under, Hamilton makes a wounded sound in his sleep. From behind, he hears Thomas breathing, and he’s aware of the visceral precariousness of his situation, of how thin of a line he’s walking. 

Madison is so goddamned tired. Stressed about Jefferson’s leg. Stressed about Hamilton. Stressed about the tightrope he’s balancing on. He spends so long trying to weigh the best course of action that he falls asleep in the process. 

—and he wakes with his arm around Hamilton’s front, his back pressed to Madison’s chest, and nothing strikes him as wrong until a second’s passed. HIs eyes widen. He drags in a sharp breath, goes stiff, tries to figure out how to extricate himself—but it’s too late.

Hamilton wakes up, and Hamilton calls him John.

There’s a split second before the shit hits, and then Hamilton scrambles, fucking falls out of the bed, scrambles to the door, shoving furniture aside, throwing the door open.

“Jesus fuckin’ Christ, what a mess,” Jefferson groggily laments after Hamilton tears out of the room, his eloquence lost to exhaustion and the ache in his injured leg. Madison doesn’t know how much he’s heard, but clearly it was enough. “Motherfucking disaster of a man,” he lightly swears, but he shifts gears the second he looks over.

Madison presses his hand into his face, shakes his head, sighs from somewhere deep in his soul. He should’ve just slept on the damn floor, let Thomas take the bed alone. What a goddamn disaster. He spent his entire career doing damage control, and yet he never has a damn idea what to do with Hamilton.

Or what he’ll do when it all inevitably comes to a head.

* * *

**May 2013**

Madison puts words to it in the most unlikely of moments.

Jefferson and Hamilton sit in the furthest row of seats back. There’s no reason why they’re both back there; they bickered over whose turn it was to appropriate the row since it has the most room to lie down, and they bickered until they fell asleep, as it would seem.

He looks in the rear-view mirror.

Hamilton is curled against Jefferson’s side, head resting in the crook of his neck. Jefferson leans right back against him, eyes closed, chest rising and falling gently.

And Madison feels such a goddamn rush of love that it takes him a long time to realize he can’t draw a line between it, can’t distinguish between what’s for Thomas and what’s for Alex. And so he looks back to the road, tendrils of fear wrapping like roots around his heart.

He has a good thing. As good as he’ll ever get. He can’t risk that. Not when he has so much to lose and only the possibility of gaining something else. And he can’t do that to Thomas.

He can’t.

(Not when he already made them lose so much time—and for what?)

But how is he supposed to go on now? Isn’t he already betraying Thomas? Isn’t he already betraying Hamilton’s so hard-to-win friendship? Isn’t he lying to them both?

How is he supposed to look at Hamilton every time the man starts to fall apart and not want to piece him together bit by bit? How is he supposed to look away?

Madison looks in the mirror again, hopeful that the illusion will be just that—an illusion. A trick of his heart. Something only there for an instant.

It’s not.

It’s not, and he’s in trouble.

The gas meter is getting low. He should stop driving.

But the two are them are sleeping and at peace in the backseat, so he doesn’t.

* * *

**Late March 2013**

It’s a quiet March afternoon, and Madison sits and meditates.

He’s having trouble concentrating; occasionally, he breaks focus, hears Jefferson and Hamilton’s murmurs from elsewhere in the house. They’re quiet, respectful, but Madison has always had exceptionally good hearing. And there are infected somewhere on the block, he thinks. He’s right too. At one point, one screeches and pounds against the window, pulling him out of his meditation. He opens his eyes, furious, but Hamilton races past the room, stops just long enough to look in.

“I’ll get it,” he soothes Madison. “Don’t worry. I’ll clear the rest of the street too.”

And so Hamilton goes out with his knife. Madison waits half a beat, debates following after him, but then Jefferson appears in the foyer, tugging on his jacket.

“Don’t worry,” he warmly reassures Madison, and he follows Hamilton out. “I’ve got his back.”

The two of them leave, and now the house is quiet.

There’s no convenient reason why he shouldn’t be able to focus now, and so he’s forced to concede that there’s something else nagging at him.

Madison can’t quite place what, and so he shifts through his mind until a piano appears. He sits. Lays his hands over the keys. After decades of playing, he can hear the keys in his mind as crisply as if there were actual ivory beneath his fingers. There isn’t quite the same satisfaction in it, of course, but it’s something.

He plays Beethoven, Tchaikovstky, Bach.

So many of the oldest musicians are nothing but math. Formulas—predictable, safe, sensible. Madison played them as they were written once, but he finds it harder to do all the time. Now, his notes drift, blur, slide, sing with one another in ways the composer perhaps didn’t quite intend. His father would cluck at him, shake his head—but he would smile fondly as he did.

A stab of grief pierces Madison’s heart, and Beethoven soars in a way Beethoven shouldn’t.

Music, he knows, is one of the few available options left through which he makes sense of the world. He has no best friend to talk to; he’s never found out what happened to his beloved Dolley. His eldest sister, companion-in-arms against their nine younger siblings, is likely lying lifeless somewhere with the rest of his family. Washington is dead for sure. So many of his friends were politicians, politically-affiliated—almost all of them are certainly dead.

He could lose Hamilton and Thomas, the last two people he has left, but even still, he would have music. It would be scant comfort, almost certainly not enough to justify living, but Madison would try anyways. He and Thomas have promised each other as much, and his dedication to the man he loves more than life extends easily beyond death.

Bach sounds too blindingly sorrowful when he plays, nothing like the mathematical perfection he should be. Frustrated, Madison stops playing, and he thinks.

Why can’t he focus? Why’s his mind so occupied? Meditation is supposed to make things quieter, not louder. What does he want?

He latches onto the last question for the longest.

What he _wants_ is his life back; and if he can’t have that, then a trauma therapist would be a good place to start. He _wants_ to stop living through _skinsinewbone_ with every close call. He _wants_ Thomas safe, and he wants Hamilton to be in England, where he’d be safe.

He wants many, many things, but he makes do as best he can. There is, of course, no _post_ to the post-traumatic stress disorder, and though the trauma isn’t quite the constant roaring waterfall it was in those first few months, it nevertheless trickles onwards, occasionally floods. But he stays steady: stays sane with books, meditation, music, and Thomas most of all. 

_(Hamilton too,_ his mind unexpectedly adds).

He meditates.

Most of the time it helps—helps him clear his feelings, cope, work rationally through what bothers him, lets him move past what’s troubling him.

And when it doesn’t work, he always has music.

But the classics haven’t cleared his mind, and so he needs another kind of sound.

There are two distinct ways he plays. He plays Bach and Beethoven and the other classics for his own pleasure, for Thomas’s, for the single-minded clarity and focus it brings him. But there’s another kind of music he plays, and that’s his own. His own playing comes from somewhere that lies beneath rationality, somewhere he can’t reach with words, somewhere that he can only express in sounds, as broad strokes of feelings he can only pour out in music.

(Madison wrote a piece like that for Thomas once. Played it to him in lieu of being the first to say _I love you._ It’s so strange to think of it now. How he used to be so afraid to say the words that live only ever a second away on his lips. But he was, and he spent weeks and weeks finding the right way to say it without so many words, and Thomas knew.

So Thomas said _I love you_ first, and Madison was half a second behind.)

He can play Bach and Beethoven in his mind, but not his own music. 

Madison stands with a sigh. There are alas no instruments in this house, but he recalls seeing a church a mile or so away, and that’s as promisingly a place to look as any. Whatever’s troubling him needs to come out before Thomas absorbs his restlessness by osmosis.

Best not to let these things fester.

Madison tucks his revolver away, writes a brief note to Thomas— _on a walk—_ then slips outside. The air is crisp, but finally has a hint of warmth, an almost-pleasant breeze. Madison takes his time as he walks, thankful for the promise of spring’s reprieve. 

This winter has been long and cold, and he knows Hamilton has suffered far more. Undoubtedly felt every freezing night far more than he and Jefferson.

As they often seem to do these days, Madison’s thoughts turn to Hamilton. His mind wanders. He thinks of Hamilton alone at night, shivering, and he worries. But then thinks of how Hamilton’s all-too-rare smiles are at last nearing common, and he finds a faint smile pulling at his own lips. There’s a certain domesticity to all, to the way they eat together, walk together, read together. Hamilton fits himself neatly into a nook in Madison’s life that he hadn’t even known was left unfilled, and the world feels fuller, brighter for it.

It’s been a long time since September.

(He would’ve made such a mistake, not even known).

Before long, his feet carry him up the half-rotten wooden stairs of a peeling-white-painted church. It’s a tiny thing this far into the country, was certainly once a brimstone-and-hellfire congregation, but there’s a tiny upright piano near the pulpit—fantastic.

Madison plays a few chords, runs through arpeggios to warm up. The piano isn’t terribly high quality—but Madison knows his bias. He did, after all, learn to play on a piano whose price tag went on several zeroes longer than it should’ve. 

Madison thinks a moment, then plays. The thing that’s been bothering him hesitates, resits, but at last pours from soul to fingers, breathes life into the silent congregation.

He listens for answers in the notes and finds none. The piece is confused, directionless, a whirlwind of lost sound. For a measure, it sounds like a waltz, then a rhapsody, and then an etude. Madison listens more carefully, tries to pick out patterns and motifs instead. He catches a few melodies that sound like Chopin, some that remind him more of Listz. But as he plays, the piece becomes clearer, something that reminds him not of a feeling, but of a person.

All of the force of a distilled hurricane.

It’s Hamilton, he realizes, that’s been bothering him. Hamilton on his mind.

But why?

Abruptly, startlingly, he recognizes he’s playing a line from Thomas’s piece.

“Who’s that?”

Madison has his gun half-drawn before it hits him that the infected can’t speak. He turns with a sharp exhale, faces Hamilton. Hamilton stands in the threshold of the church, shifting a little uneasily on his feet, as if he’s not quite sure he should enter.

“Who’s…?” Madison prompts him, running a hand over his face.

“The composer,” Hamilton explains, tipping his head towards the piano. “Never heard you play anything like that before.”

“Oh.” Madison quickly racks his brain for the most obscure composer he can think of off the top of his head. No need to invite further questions. “Moszkowski.”

“I don’t think I like him,” Hamilton says after a moment, frowning—but he shakes it off, looks around uncomfortably. “What are you doing here? You come to pray or play?”

Madison stands, stepping pointedly away from the piano.

“I came to play.”

Hamilton’s head lifts as he regards the cross up high on the far wall. His mouth twists into something between a scowl and a frown. And then something sad flits onto his face. It’s the same expression he always has when something reminds him of the past. Madison doesn’t ask.

“Do you ever pray?” Hamilton asks, and he sounds adrift. 

He doesn’t now, but he remembers. 

It’s been nearly a decade since he stepped foot into a cathedral. Even longer ago still, he used to go every Sunday—family tradition. Morning mass on Sunday, family dinners Sunday night. And for the life of him, he can remember nothing but a few verses. _Leviticus 18:22. Leviticus 20:13. Judges 19:16-24. 1 Corinthians 6:9-11._

“No,” Madison answers, shaking his head. Wry and cold, he goes on. “If there is a God and the state of the world is their doing, then I believe I’d find the Devil to be better company.”

“Yeah. Me too,” Hamilton says, still distant, still lost in his own thoughts.

Hamilton has nothing to hold onto: no religion, no family, no partner—nothing but him and Jefferson. But friendship, the love that they offer isn’t enough to mend Hamilton’s heart, not when the two of them crack it a little more each time they hold on to one another. Loneliness is an illogical thing, Madison knows, and he sees it in Hamilton’s eyes all too often.

“What are you doing here?” Madison asks, because the best way to keep Hamilton from his own mind is to keep him busy, thinking, debating. “Is Thomas worrying over me?"

The name sends a flicker of guilt through him as his eyes skitter back to the piano.

“No,” Hamilton says with a shake of his head, recentering. “I came to scavenge. Figured the church might have shit from a food drive or something. Heard you playing as I came up.”

“Well, I’ve accomplished all I needed to.” He hasn’t. He’s accomplished nothing at all but peeling away a layer of paint he thinks he rather wishes he’d left alone. “Let’s look.”

They do, and Hamilton’s instincts prove sound: they locate a cabinet of canned food, walk back to retrieve Thomas to take it all to the Escalade.

Occasionally, their hands brush as they walk. Hamilton doesn’t seem to notice.

Do all people walk so closely? Madison wonders, but he can’t remember what it was like to walk next to anyone but Thomas and Hamilton. Still, it seems to him like the answer must be no.

Their hands brush again.

The line from Thomas’s song echoes in his head.

  
  


* * *

**March 2013**

Hamilton fits comfortably into their dynamic in a way that Madison never quite expected. There’s a brilliant mind behind the impulsiveness Madison dislikes so strongly, a spirit that bends and cracks but refuses to be crushed, a rare kind of idealism in his eyes.

He fits with Jefferson, bickers and baits and debates in ways that Madison doesn’t, and he talks with Madison about things Jefferson couldn’t give less of a damn about—not that Jefferson ever says as much, of course, because he’d humor Madison talking about goddamn beetles if it made him happy, but the interest is cherished. 

And despite it all, despite everything, Hamilton is alive.

And because he’s alive, so’s Madison. 

And Thomas too.

Despite everything, they’re all alive. They’re all breathing.

They’re alive, and they’re not alone.

“You and me against the world,” he and Thomas murmur sometimes to one another in the mornings, but somewhere along the way, it becomes _us against the world_ in Madison’s mind.

And, really, that should be the first sign.

* * *

  
  


**Late February 2013**

_Why would he sacrifice himself?_

Madison doesn’t remember much from that week, but he remembers sitting on the side of the tub with Hamilton when he gets his answer. He remembers that, and he never forgets.

 _I ran from Laurens in Charleston,_ Hamilton tells him. _I didn’t want to run again._

Madison thinks of the inauguration. How they ran. They had to, and there was no choice—but that doesn't mean it doesn't haunt him while he sleeps.

For the first time, he looks at Hamilton and wonders if they’ve ever been as different as he thought.

* * *

**February 2013**

It surprises Madison how little he wants to let Hamilton’s hand go.

Hamilton is not his friend—not in any meaningful sense of the world. Madison offers his friendship willingly, but Hamilton won’t accept.

(And so why die for him? Why sacrifice himself for someone that means nothing to him?)

It should’ve been him that was bitten.

And so, outside of Boston as they say their goodbyes, Madison realizes that he doesn’t want Hamilton to go. There’s still too much he wants to say. Too much he has to make up for. 

Too much he doesn’t understand.

There’s nothing to do about it, of course. They’ve all agreed that this is the best course of action. This is the only way things can go.

(And, maybe, just maybe, Madison will be able to sleep at night again without his _skinsinewbone_ nightmare. Maybe it’ll be enough to know that Hamilton is safe somewhere across the ocean, somewhere where Madison won’t fail him. Somewhere where Madison can’t fail him. Where Madison won’t have to worry.)

But, somehow, none of that means Madison wants to say goodbye. 

He wishes, selfishly, that he had more time to find the words he’s looking for.

 _Be careful what you wish for,_ he thinks later, droll and defeated.

* * *

  
  


**Late December 2012**

Thomas finds him, and Madison can’t keep it together.

“Jesus, oh, shit, you’re covered in blood, oh my god,” Thomas panics, holding him upright. “Shh, Christ, fuck, I’m here, Jemmy. I’m here. Shh, shh, I’ve got you. It’s alright. Where’s Alex? Jemmy? Jemmy?”

* * *

**December 2012**

The thing that Madison is perhaps guiltiest over is that he expects Hamilton to run. To cut loose and go. There’s no one to hold him accountable, nothing for him to gain by staying. Madison is, after all, the one who threatened to chase Hamilton down if he abandoned Thomas. Thomas would do the same, of course, but he’d never be any the wiser if Hamilton bolted now. 

And so Madison is cornered, and he expects Hamilton to run.

Hamilton does run. Just not in the direction Madison expected.

And then the thing that haunts Madison's nightmares happens.

Skin. Sinew. Bone.

Hamilton doesn’t scream, but he looks right into Madison’s eyes and tries to speak, and it’s there in his eyes, the terrified, awful realization that he may still be breathing, but he’s dead. It’s over. Done. He fought back, and he tried, and he made it through day after day after day, and now it’s over. He lost. He’s dead. No more bickering from the backseat. No more witticisms, insights into a brilliant mind. No more third person to watch their backs.

The sun will rise tomorrow, but not for Hamilton. 

Hamilton is dead. A man Madison never even particularly cared for, and—

_No._

All of Madison’s grief and guilt and pain manifest like hot tar in his throat. 

_No._

Scorching, stinging, it chokes him. He can’t breathe.

_No. No. No._

He can’t die here. They can’t both die here.

And he can’t let Hamilton die alone. He can’t. He’s failed Hamilton already, but he can’t fail him one last time. Hamilton deserves better than that.

They can’t die here.

Madison shouldn’t survive, but he does.

And Hamilton shouldn’t survive either, but he does.

They get more time, and they use it to collide and come apart.

* * *

**April 2011**

Middles are messy, Madison knows. And nothing ever quite gets neatly wrapped up after the outbreak. Afterwards, there are no clean endings, no final closure. Not anymore. Only screams. Screams or unending silence, and Madison doesn’t know which is worse.

But beginnings are simple.

There are so few complications at the start, so few considerations to make, so few variables to weigh and balance and so few ways for things to go wrong.

It’s simple in the beginning.

It’s April, and it’s nearly the crunching end of a long, long election, and Madison and Jefferson are close to having it all—if Washington wins. And so they forgo their regular dates, forgo fun, hunker down to grind through until election day, and that’s how they end up at Henry Laurens’ estate on a Saturday night fundraiser when they would both prefer to be anywhere else. It’s a donor party, sure, and it’s a necessary evil, but it’s made worse by just how much they mutually despise Henry Laurens.

If the blatant disdain on Henry’s son’s face is anything to go by, he seems to feel the same. Subtly, Madison subtly elbows Thomas, tips his head in the man’s direction. Thomas follows his gaze. He gives Madison a look— _can’t be a worse conversationalist than anyone we’ve already talked to._ And so they navigate through the floor, nodding, smiling, exchanging greetings as they weave through the crowd until they reach their destination. The man— _John,_ Madison’s mind supplies—looks up, offers a friendly smile.

“Mister Madison. Mister Jefferson,” Henry Laurens’ son says with the familiar, perfectly manicured politeness only a politician’s child can have. The _Mister_ before his name feels excessively deferential, Madison thinks—John Laurens isn’t even half a dozen years his junior—but he says nothing. “It’s a pleasure to see you both.”

“It’s been a while,” Thomas comments, brows raised. “Shit, last time I saw you, you hadn’t even headed off to Columbia. How’s that going, huh?”

“Oh, not bad,” John replies, voice growing warmer at Thomas’s informality. “New York is great. And I don’t mind being away from home.”

“No?” Thomas innocently prompts him, and John’s face flashes with frustration.

“Yeah, and I’d like it better if I wasn’t expected to come to these things,” he says, too sharp. He recovers a second later, pastes a too-polite smile back on his face. “But don’t worry—Washington has my full support. These Redcoats don’t want it with me!” John laughs. 

Jefferson laughs too, lures John into a pleasant conversation. Madison observes, makes notes: John is wearing a dark brown suit, some kind of floral cologne, his hair tied back but long. Madison very carefully conceals his amusement; he knows all too well that Henry Laurens hates every single one of those things on men. John talks freely, smiles, laughs—he seems much happier than the somber, quiet teenager Madison remembers. 

“—lotta great people, lotta good friends. I came with one of them, actually,” John is saying when Madison returns to their conversation. As he speaks, a man his age—early twenties?—slides up beside him, two drinks in hand. John looks over, and the brilliant joy that lights his face reveals more than everything he’s said so far. “Oh! This is him.”

John smiles bright as the sun, and Madison’s eyes slide to Jefferson’s, and with an almost imperceptibly arched brow, a look, Jefferson says: _yeah, some fucking friend._

 _Henry Laurens would absolutely not like this_ , Madison thinks. He absorbs the information, files it away for some other time when it might be of use.

Then, he sweeps John’s _friend_ over, observes: cheap suit, cheap shoes, cheap cologne. Everything about him screams impoverished college student, nothing like the respectable, old-money, upper-class person Madison would’ve pinned John with. Jefferson sees it too, sends him a sideways look: _interesting,_ they communicate to one another.

“This is my friend Alex,” John says to them, still smiling like the man—Alex, apparently—hung the sun. The man’s smile—bright as John’s—grows strained at the word _friend._ Ah. So it goes both ways, then. Interesting. “Alex, this is—”

“Oh, I know who they are,” Alex interrupts, and the heat in his voice takes Madison by surprise. 

It’s hard to discern passion from hostility, and Madison can’t decide whether to be intrigued or off-put. But he doesn’t have the chance to choose, because Alex turns his red-hot-heat onto Thomas and Thomas alone. Madison resists the urge to roll his eyes. Anyone with half a finger in the political pie knows better than to not address them both; Thomas moves in the public eye, and he might have the power to sway the masses, but it’s Madison that moves the marionettes behind the curtains.

“I was just thinking about you, actually. I wanted to discuss your latest choice to introduce Bill Number BHR831, despite the clear and imminent effects on the economy presented by—”

Now Madison actually does roll his eyes, a dramatic motion that only he can still make so controlled, so subtle that only Thomas picks up on it. Jefferson snickers, catching the man off-guard long enough for Madison to cut in.

“I suppose in your analysis you didn’t happen to notice who authored the bill?”

John smiles sheepishly at them both, equal parts chagrined and charmed by his friend.

“I only _introduced_ the bill,” Thomas adds, flashing a white smile. “My colleague Madison here wrote it—but he was campaigning with Washington while we were in session.” He arches his brows, unimpressed. “What’d you say your name was again?”

“Hamilton,” he replies, turning his hostility back on himself with a shake of his head. He recovers quickly, though, pivots, redirects his intensity. “But never mind that. Like I was saying—”

“Oh, would you look at that,” Thomas flatly cuts him off, deciding that Alex is neither influential nor rich enough to be worth their time. “I see someone Madison and I have gotta say hi to. Well, nice to meet you… what was it? Hamilton? And always good to see you, John. Stay in touch.”

Jefferson’s hand rests on Madison’s back—between his shoulders, somewhere safe, friendly—and he guides them both away before Alex can recover. Once they’re a safe distance away, Jefferson audibly groans his irritation, dramatically rolls his eyes.

“So you got the tension between the two of them, right?”

“Given that I’m neither blind nor deaf? Yes.” Madison’s eyes sweep over the room. “Based on the lack of theatrics, I’m certain Henry Laurens hasn’t met his son’s guest yet.”

“Bet John introduces him as a _roommate_ ,” Jefferson laughs, teasing a subdued smile out of Madison. The days of calling Thomas his roommate return to him, and he feels a flash of commiseration for the two men. Jefferson breaks him from his sympathy with a shake of his head and a scoff. “Don’t know what John sees in him. Big fuckin’ talker for someone who came in a suit two sizes too big.”

“You could’ve been more tactful,” Madison says, and though it’s phrased like a suggestion, Jefferson knows to hear it like criticism. 

A little chastened, Jefferson clicks his tongue.

“Mm. Sorry. You want to go back and go to bat over _my_ bill for me?” he teases.

“I’d rather not,” Madison replies, hiding a twitch of his mouth with a sip of wine.

“In that case, you’re welcome.”

And Madison rolls his eyes, and, frankly, he doesn’t think about Hamilton again until the man punches Henry Laurens square in the jaw in full sight of every donor at the gala, every donor whose pockets they desperately need to try open to push Washington through the election—every donor who’s now looking at Washington to do damage control.

_How can one man be so goddamned reckless?_

Madison’s fucking furious. He’s furious from the moment Henry Laurens hits the ground, furious that he has to draft press releases and apologies through the night, furious that he has to toe the line between denouncing Henry Laurens and erring too far on the side of radicalism, furious that the lovely evening he had planned with Thomas goes down the drain.

_Irresponsibly reckless._

It’s simple in the beginning.

There is Hamilton, hotheaded and reckless—traits that Madison dislikes—and so Madison dislikes him. Jefferson finds him grating, obnoxious, and Jefferson dislikes him. They stand on opposite sides, a line drawn thick in the sand between. It’s uncrossable. Simple. Safe. Easy.

And so when they first find Hamilton in Virginia, it’s easy for him to turn to Thomas while they’re alone, to say, 

“I don’t want to have anything to do with him.”

Because the irresponsibly reckless get themselves and the people they’re with killed.

(And Hamilton is still reckless, fucking viciously reckless, punches Thomas in the goddamned jaw, leaves behind a bruise that purples for days—)

Beginnings are easy.

But middles? Those are messy.

And there are never any happy endings.

**Author's Note:**

> -cadenza: generically, an improvised or written-out ornamental passage played or sung by a soloist or soloists, usually in a "free" rhythmic style, and often allowing virtuosic display. yes i use james madison to talk about classical music. what are you going to do about it lmaooo
> 
> -sharknado was actually released in 2013 but i have a very specific image in mind of hamilton, laurens, and hercules watching it together while stoned out of their minds, so. in this AU sharknado was released in 2010
> 
> -yes, chapter seven ends well for no one. yes, you should be afraid
> 
> -writing 12k? not easy. pressing a button to leave kudos? easy. if you also leave a comment, i'll love you forever


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